


Still Things to Do

by TinyFakeFanficRock



Series: Ad meliora [2]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Euthanasia, F/M, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Slavery, Tribal Courier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-14
Updated: 2017-02-14
Packaged: 2018-09-24 11:06:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9721226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TinyFakeFanficRock/pseuds/TinyFakeFanficRock
Summary: Her primary survival mechanism is to ignore her feelings.  It works until it doesn't.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Betaed into something much better than its first draft by my dear friend Lindra.

Mel wasn't used to being asked to make choices that mattered to anyone, let alone entire towns, but first Goodsprings, and now Primm, had asked her to help determine their future. Goodsprings had been an easy choice after she'd seen the way Joe Cobb threatened Trudy -- she'd seen too many burning towns already. This business of finding Primm a new sheriff, however, was rather more complicated.

The NCR helped itself to enough of the Mojave that Mel didn't see any reason to hand them Primm as well, especially since it hadn't escaped her that despite their presence here, _she_ was the one to rescue Deputy Beagle from the Bison Steve. They cared for territory, not the people living there. The best case scenario was that they'd simply raise a flag and leave the town to continue fending for itself; worst case, they'd expel the people living here and import NCR citizens to take their place. She'd seen Bullhead City and talked to enough other western tribals over the years to know it had happened more than once, all over the West.

That said, going to the prison to recruit a felon from the ranks of the men she'd pissed off two days ago didn't sound like a great idea, either, but life was about choosing the least-bad from a host of bad options. She could at least talk to him, see if he had any potential at all. And if he didn't ... well, might as well see if he did first. So she went.

The Powder Ganger at the door demanded a hundred caps in exchange for entry privileges. Mercifully, he appeared not to have heard about the defense of Goodsprings and her role in it, and was willing to accept a super stimpak instead. So willing, in fact, that Mel suspected this hadn't been her smartest trade. She still wasn't sorry to see it go. She remembered how sick she'd felt when the Followers used one on the infected burn on her shoulder.

Considering Joe Cobb's behavior in Goodsprings and the way the door guard eyed her up on her way in, Mel got quite nervous when she asked a few other Powder Gangers about Meyers and got a faceful of colorfully-worded suspicion and contempt. What kind of person did they reject?

To her pleasant surprise, a decent one. He offered her coffee -- well, coffee-flavored water, anyway -- and asked "What's your story?" in a way that didn't even sound like a pick-up line. She told him her standard tribal-turned-courier tale, leaving out her most recent almost-murder, and asked him a bit about his own background. He actually spoke to her as an equal before he knew she had anything to offer him, which was a good sign. He was candid about his past, almost clinical, describing his prison sentence as a "fair enough trade" for his crimes. Meyers might not be perfect; he declared his intention to keep taking the law into his own hands when he felt the need -- but it also didn't sound like that was a choice he made lightly. When she offered him the job at Primm, he even had the sense to ask for a pardon before he accepted.

Of course, that brought its own difficulty to the situation. Mel waited until she was out of sight of the prison to allow herself a sigh. _And here I thought dealing with the Powder Gangers would avoid having to ask the NCR for favors._ Still, she turned south and headed to the Mojave Outpost.

She'd been to this checkpoint regularly enough over the past several years to develop favorite officers, so when she got to the counter, she was glad to see the one on duty was Major Knight. He had a kind face and a consistently professional demeanor, which was more than some of his comrades possessed when women passed through alone.

Mel identified herself as a courier for his logbook, then explained her business. The current power vacuum in Primm and Johnson Nash's request for help were straightforward enough. Now came the part that was going to cause trouble: "So I found a guy with experience, but he's from the correctional facility and would like a pardon first."

Knight stared at her as if she'd suggested putting radscorpions in charge of the town. "One of the Powder Gangers? They've been nothing but trouble --"

She cut in before he could get too angry. "He isn't involved with them. He's just been sitting in the visitors' center, drinking bad coffee, and waiting for the NCR to come back, even though his sentence is almost up. Even the other Powder Gangers confirmed that he hasn't helped them. Doesn't sound like much trouble to me. Primm could do a hell of a lot worse." _Like depending on you._

"Primm _is_ important to our trade up from California, so having someone there who owes us a favor ... that couldn't hurt." 

His eagerness to have someone in power whom he -- or his superiors, she supposed -- could manipulate made her glad she was very good at hiding her disgust. But at least he granted the pardon. At least the NCR _had_ pardons. She was well-acquainted with far harsher "justice". She pushed down the thoughts of crosses, whips, _his_ hands around her neck. _That's not going to help right now._

"While I get that drawn up, stamped, and signed, maybe you could do something for us." He told her to see a Ranger Ghost about some reconaissance in the town of Nipton.

Mel agreed immediately; Nipton was on the way to Novac anyway, and she didn't like the idea of Major Knight thinking she also owed the NCR a favor. She got the details from the ranger: smoke rising, no word from the town, possibility of a Powder Ganger attack or something else unpleasant. But checking up on the town hall didn't sound too onerous, so she donned her hooded hat and sunglasses and hit the road.

The journey there was short, but far more exciting than she'd expected. Turned out a pack of Jackals had taken over a half-crumbled building on the roadside since the last time she'd been through. Fortunately for her, they were just finishing off a pair of radscorpions, one of them a giant, so the ones who weren't already dying in poisoned agony were distracted while she circled around their encampment. Unfortunately for her, a couple of other travelers nearby chose that moment to get into a gunfight and draw everyone's attention in her direction. She was extremely lucky to be the battle's only survivor, taking only one small bullet wound that a stimpak made short work of, and while she waited for it to finish working, she checked the Jackals' hideout for any provisions worth taking.

To her surprise, she found a sizable stash of Med-X -- probably looted in a previous ambush. In her experience, the Jackals weren't much for drugs, unlike the Fiends, Scorpions, or Great Khans. She stowed it in her pack, figuring she could either trade it in a pinch or donate it to the Followers the next time she was in Freeside. She knew she wouldn't use it herself, not after -- she pushed the previous experience from her mind. Mel needed to focus on the present, because she still had things to do, and she was close enough now to see that something terrible had indeed happened at Nipton.

The smoke Ghost mentioned was coming from multiple fires burning in the streets, and as she drew nearer, she realized that it also carried the smell of burning flesh, and with it memories of the Legion. First, of course, she thought of her parents, her aunts, her grandparents, and the rest of the Ironwood adults, barred into the schoolhouse they'd used as a meeting hall while they decided whether to accept Caesar's terms of surrender and burned alive when they rejected them. Then came images of White Tank, a settlement _he_ had brought her along to see him destroy. He'd drugged the inhabitants -- and her as well -- before slaughtering them all in their beds and waking her to have her drag their bodies to a pyre at the town's entrance as a warning to passerby.

She shuddered hard, then pushed those images down and tried to steady herself. After all, this could have been an accidental fire. Even when people weren't careless with cigarettes and candles, old buildings had old wires that sometimes still sparked, and there was always something flammable nearby. A couple years back in the Hub, a blaze had spread so fast it consumed an entire block before anyone could bring buckets. And even if this was deliberate, it might have happened in a riot. Nipton wasn't a particularly sedate town, and maybe a bar fight -- or a raucous party -- had gotten out of hand. She was just on edge, she told herself, only jumping to the ugliest conclusions because "The Burned Man Walks!" was scrawled on the wall of the Jackals' hideout, and she knew very well to whom that referred.

But not every terrible thing that happened in the Wasteland could be laid at the feet of Caesar's Legion. _Breathe, then move,_ she told herself firmly, resurrecting a refrain from her days in Flagstaff that had gotten her through more frightening moments than this: _You still have things to do._ She was supposed to be gathering information.

And for that, she would need to protect herself from all the acrid smoke. Mel retrieved from her pack a bandana and bottle of dirty water, wet the cloth, and held it to her face as she drew near enough to see the terrible explanation for the destruction, hung in red and gold on either side of the town's entrance: The Legion bull.

Oh, God. She should have trusted her instincts. It was just like White Tank. She stared at the idly flapping banners, accompanied this time by rows of heads on poles. The cuts on their necks were fresh, sending a spike of fear through her chest: What if their killers were still here? To her shame, she actually half-turned to run, since she _could_ run now, but bit the inside of her cheek hard to push down the fear and made herself put her feet back on course. _You don't know who's there. The Legion might be gone, and if there are survivors, they'll need help more than you need to run._

As if on cue, a Powder Ganger came running toward her, shouting in what she initially thought was desperation and then slowly realized as she made out his words was jubilation: "Who won the lottery? I did! Smell that air! Couldn't ya just drink it like booze?"

His glasses were askew, his eyes vacant, and his laughter maniacal. She wondered if he'd mixed drugs you shouldn't, and tried asking if he was all right, but couldn't get anything coherent out of him. He just crowed that he'd won the "only lottery that matters" and ran off into the desert, chanting that he was a winner.

Her fear was starting to give way to curiosity: what the hell had happened here? The Legion wouldn't have left someone like that alive. Had he come upon the aftermath and been driven mad by it? Only one way to find out. Mel took another breath and kept walking toward the center of town, averting her eyes from the severed heads and the burning piles of garbage, rubble, and bodies in hopes of averting her thoughts as well. When she turned toward the town hall, she discovered, to her horror, that there were still five Legionaries here, two of them laughing as their dogs fought over what looked like a human limb, probably torn from one of the crosses lining both sides of the street.

She began to back away, hoping to go unnoticed, but this was not a good day in the stealth department. Their leader, in one of those disgusting vexillarius helmets, spied her, descended the steps of the town hall, and strode toward her. She was surprised he made no move toward his weapon, but she did the same, partly out of a desire not to escalate the situation and partly to keep him from noticing she carried a Legion officer's machete. The goggles hid the man's eyes, but as he drew closer, the set of his shoulders and the lines of his narrow face were sickeningly familiar. Mel froze. _Oh, God, not him, please not him._

Her plea went unanswered; when he spoke, his unmistakable voice confirmed that he was, indeed, her husband. "Don't worry, I won't have you lashed to a cross like the rest of these degenerates. It's useful that you happened by. I want you to witness the fate of the town of Nipton, to memorize every detail."

His reassurance provided none; if he discovered her identity, crucifixion was one of the better things that could happen to her. Despite the heat, her fingers now felt cold and stiff, but she tightened her grip on the cloth over her nose and mouth, knowing it was the only thing between her and the rest of her nightmares. She had to hold together here; her life literally depended on it. _Breathe._ Don't _move. You still have things to do._

He continued, "And then, when you move on? I want you to teach everyone you meet the lesson that Caesar's Legion taught here, especially any NCR troops you run across."

Mel's mind was racing. Should she risk a reply? He might recognize her voice, but if she said nothing, that would strike him as odd, and then he might insist on seeing her face. What would a normal person say in the face of this hell?

"What 'lesson'?" she finally said, dropping her voice an octave and playing up the roughness the smoke had left in her throat, but not too much -- she didn't want to remind him of how she'd sounded after the times he'd choked her.

But he was distracted by the opportunity to explain his handiwork. "Where to begin? That they are weak, and we are strong? This much was known already. But the depths of their moral sickness, their ... dissolution?" He continued on in a manner she'd come to know well, part loving description of the atrocity he'd wrought, part philosophy lecture. He was as proud of this as he'd been when he took the chief of White Tank's Pre-War felt hat as a trophy, even though the thing was too big for him.

He was standing beside her now, still talking in that easy conversational tone that made his crimes sound all the worse, and close enough that Mel easily could have cut the words out of his smug bastard throat. She wanted nothing more than to do so -- her heart was hammering out _kill him kill him kill him now_ against her ribcage, -- but there were four other Legionaries and their dogs looking on. Too many for her to deal with on her own. If she killed him here, she'd become _their_ plaything, which would be a shorter hell than her marriage, true, but one she would surely not survive.

And she had been surviving for far too long to give it all up now. So she waited for him to finish talking, seething at how somehow, after all the miles and years, they'd found their way back into this intolerable routine, where he spoke and she hated him but still obeyed.

"I'll do as you ask." Mel hoped she sounded businesslike, but was really just glad she'd found something to say that wasn't "Yes, husband," which had threatened for a second to spring to her lips automatically.

She turned to go, assuming his order was also her dismissal, but then he said, "One last thing, girl."

Mel halted instantly. Had he recognized her after all and just kept the conversation going this long to toy with her? It was the sort of thing he would do.

But instead he said, "That machete you carry is a Legion weapon. Where did you get it?"

"Took it off a dead body a ways east of here," she replied easily, hoping her relief wasn't terribly obvious; he was hardly the first to ask, and it was true: Gurges had been dead, and Flagstaff certainly counted as "a ways east". Somewhere in the back of her head, she wanted to laugh at his paying more attention to the machete than to her. _That's not funny; that's going to save your life,_ she upbraided herself before realizing she had it backwards: that kind of detachment was what was going to save her life here, if anything she did could.

His mouth twitched and she held her breath -- that answer displeased him, and it was a moment before he spoke again. "You're more scavenger than courier. Pathetic. You may thank me for all the bodies I've left you to loot."

She exhaled, slowly so the cloth in front of her mouth didn't give a telltale flutter, then realized he was actually waiting for her to say just that. Mel considered refusing, but decided the safest course was to end the conversation as soon as he allowed it. "Thank you." The words tasted worse than the ash on the air.

"And now I bid you _vale_ ... until we meet again." The very idea made her stomach churn. Why did he think he'd see her again? She didn't dare ask, and he didn't explain, only turned and signaled his subordinates, who called their dogs, and the entire procession set off to the east.

Mel watched them go until she stopped shaking -- when had she started shaking? -- and then examined the unlucky bastards on the crosses. They were too far gone, all of them. Well, now she knew what to do with the Jackals' Med-X. She was glad for her height and the smattering of medical training she'd acquired during her stay in The Divide: the combination of the two, along with the nearby wooden crate she stood on, let her administer enough of the drug to each of them to end their suffering. She didn't know if they could still hear her, but she told them she was sorry and pushed away memories of poor Kit. There were still things to do.

Then she unbarred the door to the town hall, where a second pack of Legion mongrels set upon her. Once she fought them off and swiped a vodka-soaked cloth over the bites, she wondered why they'd been left behind with all these dead bodies when the other dogs had been taken along. Then she looked more closely at the corpse nearest her and realized these people had likely been alive when they were shut in with the dogs. She thought of her family again and wondered if people being mauled to death screamed the same way people being burned did before she slapped the counter beside her and actually swore aloud. "Fuck. _Not now_."

Mel went over both main floors of the building, the top-floor office, and the basement. Everyone here was indeed dead, a few shot, but mostly throats torn out by the mongrels. That probably should have triggered more of a response from her than a headshake and a vague sense of pity, but she had no feelings left, all of them pushed away into a cupboard in her head that she could _not_ afford to open now.

She continued her search in the hotel, the houses, the trailers. The only other signs of life in town were some bark scorpions and a robot that burned her arm before she staved in its eye with her ax handle. It barely registered.

Mel was actually startled when she checked the trading post and found another survivor, apparently the victim of her husband's monstrous sense of humor: his life had been spared, but his legs were shattered, trapping him here, hidden behind boarded-up windows. She didn't want to think about how long he might have been here alone in excruciating pain if she hadn't been looking everywhere. Probably long enough to die of thirst; there were three bottles of purified water sitting on a high shelf across the room, easily within his sight, but utterly unreachable in his current condition. She bet _he_ had put them there.

The man's injuries were far beyond her skills -- she suspected both legs would have to be amputated -- and there was no way she could move him by herself without making things worse. She took the water down for him, gave him a dose of Med-X, and asked if there was someone she could bring to help him.

His answering stare was incredulous. "Bitch, are you serious? The only guys that woulda helped me were here, and they're either on crosses or got taken away as slaves."

She bristled a little at the epithet, but there was more pertinent information to focus on. "They took slaves, too?"

"Yeah, the third-place runners-up. Bunch of those Legion fucks dragged them off right away. They was headed east, if you're feeling heroic."

 _Heroic_ wasn't exactly the word she had in mind, but she would still go after them, and told him so.

He obviously didn't believe her and maintained his bravado. "Don't act like you'd be doing me a favor. I don't give a fuck. And don't you even fucking _think_ about bringing the NCR in here for my ass. They ain't gonna help a Powder Ganger."

That was, she was afraid, an accurate assessment. So she went through the store and the apartment above it and collected food, an empty bucket, a second bucket full of water, soap, a few clean cloths, a couple of magazines, and a pillow and blanket for him. She added half the water from her pack to the three bottles he had; when he saw the remaining Med-X, he demanded that as well. Mel handed the four syringes over and hoped he didn't do anything final with them while she got some help and rescued his friends. If he was still alive when she brought them back, they could get him to a doctor. _If_.

God damn _if_ , she thought on her way back to the Mojave Outpost. It was a hoping word. She laughed bitterly when she passed the Burned Man graffiti this time -- when she'd heard about the Legate's messy end a few years back, she had hoped that, since her husband spent so much time currying favor with the now-disgraced commander, Caesar would have executed him as well. But fate was never that kind.

Especially where _he_ was involved. "Memorize every detail," he'd told her, as if any normal human could forget it. God, she hated him, and her sheer powerlessness to stop his atrocities. She'd been free seven years now, but it seemed so little had changed. And he was here now, and she couldn't hide her face forever.

Her current misery was her own fault, really: she let herself hope he was dead. She let herself hope she wouldn't see him again. She let herself hope there would be people in Nipton she could actually help. All her mistakes could be summarized as hope.

She stopped when the giant statue up ahead blurred, blinked several times, squared her shoulders, and forced herself to keep moving. _You still have things to do._

Mel managed to hold herself together long enough to tell the story to Sergeant Kilborn, and again to Ranger Ghost, and once more when Ghost brought her to Ranger Jackson, saying the higher-ups needed to hear it straight from the source. At least her husband's brutality gave her a good reason to be this visibly distraught.

She tried to talk Jackson into sending a few troopers with her to rescue the people kidnapped from Nipton, but to no avail: "Miss," he began, and when civilized people called her that, it was never the opening to anything good. "The Mojave Outpost has been ordered to have a standing force at the NCR perimeter at all times. So sending anyone out reduces the Outpost's numbers and would be in direct violation of my orders from back West." And then he had the gall to complain that he couldn't even send anyone out to clear the road north and ask her to do that "since you're here."

Mel knew if she said anything, she would start screaming at him and not stop until she needed a pardon of her own, so she simply turned on her heel and left.

Ghost caught up to her. "Sorry about Jackson and his orders," she said. "You're not the first one he's said that to. Fucking Mojave's going to hell, and all we can do is sit here and watch. Anyway, I doubt you feel like eating or sleeping, but you should at least sit down and drink some water. You look really pale. And coming from me, that's saying something."

Mel knew to summon laughter when _he_ said something he expected her to find amusing, and she did it again here in hopes of convincing Ghost she'd be all right. She wasn't sure it worked, but at least the ranger returned to her lookout post atop the barracks.

Night was falling, but she really wanted to get back on the road anyway. Major Knight, however, was nowhere to be seen, and she didn't want to risk asking at the counter for the pardon in case whoever was on duty now didn't think granting one was a good idea. After everything she'd been through -- and it seemed like it'd been weeks since she asked for Meyers' pardon, -- she didn't want to jeopardize her original goal.

Mel couldn't afford to get sloppy now, but she already had while she was talking to Jackson. She'd slipped and used the Legion's term for the prisoners, _captures_ , where a regular person would simply have said _slaves_. _Now you get to hope no one here thinks about that too hard and has you hauled in as a spy. But then, they'd have to spare soldiers for that, wouldn't they?_

The harsh laugh that the thought tore out of her throat sounded more like a bark of pain; the rush of exhalation with it felt more like being punched in the stomach. They were familiar sensations. Mel found herself shaking again. _Breathe. Move._ She ducked behind the barracks. _You still have things to --_

But at the moment, there _wasn't_ anything for her to do, and that was what ultimately broke open the overstuffed cupboard in her head. Everything she'd pushed down today spilled out at once. It felt like a grenade had gone off inside her brain. Mel's knees buckled and she collapsed into a corner where some crates met the wall, stuffed her bandana into her mouth, wrapped her arms around her knees, and finally allowed herself to cry, body rocking with the force of sobs she couldn't hold back anymore. She hadn't cried like this since her son died; hell, this was the first time she'd cried at all since she hacked off her hair to disguise herself after escaping.

 _All those people. All those people._ And once again she'd done nothing to stop him, just because she would have died. _How many lives do you think yours is worth?_

Before she could consider the question and descend further into self-hatred, she heard the approaching crunch of boots on the dirt. "Hey. Are you gonna be okay?" The trooper dropped to one knee beside her. It was Major Knight.

Mel hurriedly wiped down her face and sucked in deep breaths to try to compose herself, though she knew he'd already seen her blubbering like a child. At least he wasn't trying to hold her hand; this was embarrassing enough as it was.

He pulled an envelope from his right pocket and held it out to her. "This is the pardon, but -- sorry. If I had any idea what Nipton would be like, I wouldn't have sent you up to Ghost," Knight told her gently.

As long as he still believed it was only the carnage that had upset her, she could probably salvage this. "Somebody had to do it," she said, and it would have sounded more noble if she didn't now have the hiccups. She dashed the back of her hand across her eyes again. "Sorry you had to come find me hiding back here bawling next to the crates of empty bottles."

"No, there's not much privacy here, and I get not wanting everyone here to see ... a different side of you." He coughed. "Speaking of, I was, um, supposed to meet someone here, and ..." He trailed off and looked deeply embarrassed, leaving no doubt about his meaning.

"Oh!" She sprang to her feet, grateful for the out. "I'll leave you to that, then."

Pardon in her pocket, she went to deliver it to Meyers, the night breeze drying her face. She'd seen too many burning towns already, and he was Primm's best chance to avoid the same fate. Maybe he knew someone who could help her free the Legion's prisoners, too.

 _He_ might still be alive, but she was, too, and there were still things she could do.


End file.
